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This article examines the relationship between the leader of the Aqquyunlu Turkman confederation, ‘Uthmān Beg Qarā Yulūk, and the Mamluk Sultanate, with an eye to the ways in which the Mamluks sought to define the limits of sultanic sovereignty on the frontier, as well as the ways in which Qarā Yulūk sought to pursue his own interests and those of his tribal followers within the framework of the Mamluk political order. What becomes apparent is that while the interests of the Turkmans ultimately clashed with those of the Mamluk sultans on the Anatolian frontier, both Qarā Yulūk and the Mamluks shared a common interest in maintaining a relationship in which formal recognition of Aqquyunlu autonomy was exchanged for ritual submission to the sultan.

The sovereignty of God and related ideas have had a prominent place in Islamist discourses. Key figures like Mawdudi of Pakistan and Qutb of Egypt have argued that anything less than exclusive submission to God's law, and all that it necessitates in religious and political terms, is idolatry. Yet the idea of the sovereignty of God has been invoked by many more people than the Islamists, and it has meant quite different things in different quarters. Focusing on South Asia, this paper seeks to shed some new light on the provenance of this idea, on how and to what purpose it has been deployed in religious and political argument, and what the debates on it might tell us about rival conceptions of Islam.

“When Red Pigeons Gathered on Tang's House” (Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu 赤之集湯之屋) is a Warring States period bamboo manuscript written in the script of the Chu state. It concerns figures that are well known in historical legend: Tang 湯, the founder of the Shang dynasty; his wife; his minister Yi Yin 伊尹, here called by the title xiaochen 小臣 [minor servitor]; and the last king of the Xia dynasty, here called simply the Xia Lord (xia hou 夏后). These figures have their familiar identities, but the tale recorded in the manuscript is unique and has no apparent political or philosophical import. The protagonist, Xiaochen, is Tang's cook, but he does not play the role of founding minister raised up by a future king. Moreover, he is associated with a nexus of motifs associated with shamans, including spirit possession. He acquires clairvoyance after eating a soup of magic red birds (jiu 鳩, [pigeons] or hu 鵠 [cranes]) intended for Tang. After fleeing from an angry Tang, he is possessed by a spirit-medium raven. He then cures the illness of the Xia Lord by having him move his house and kill the yellow snakes and white rabbits under his bed. One rabbit escapes and the story concludes that this is why parapets are placed on houses, suggesting that the context of the story was the construction of a building. Thus, it may have been similar to a historiola, narrated in a ritual to sanctify houses after the placement of the parapet, thus preventing illness among the inhabitants.

Students of Chinese intellectual history are familiar with moral cosmology developed in the Han era, a theory that alleges that ru use omens to admonish the emperor, and thereby to constrain and compete with his absolute political power. This thesis, in theory, is convincing; in actuality it is not. This article questions the autonomous power of omen discourse. Focusing on the socio-political conditions in which this discourse functioned, it demonstrates that, in real politics, the enactment of omen interpretation had nothing to do with restraining the power of the throne, but evolved with bloody factional struggles. Replacing the secret knowledge of diviners and astrologers with the common cultural heritage—the classics—and transforming the mysterious otherworldly spirits into a moral agent, ru successfully defeated the technical specialists and became the primary operators of the omen interpretation enterprise. The theoretical innovation that contributed to ru's success, however, undermined their chance of building a social closure both to close off competition and to secure their interpretative authority. As numerous historical cases show, neither the ru classics nor the moral competence of the speaker add to the social efficacy of omen explanation: without monopolised knowledge, standardised hermeneutic rules, or institutionalised positions, omen discourse, rather than contesting political power, became its servant.

This article examines the functions of Chinese and foreign intermediary elites in the commercial and political world of Shanghai, an international city in the nineteenth century mainly consisting of British, American, European and Chinese residents. Specifically, it focuses on the formation of the socio-economic network of Tong Mow-chee (Tang Maozhi 唐茂枝) (1828–1897), a well-known Chinese comprador-merchant serving the British firm Jardine Matheson & Co. and other anglophone and Chinese figures, including William Venn Drummond and Tong King-sing who supported Mow-chee's commercial and political activities. My research mainly draws on English and Chinese sources and enables a deeper understanding of the unofficial figures who contributed to the management of the international society of Shanghai in the late nineteenth century, offering new insight into social roles of the middlemen operating in an area of Britain's informal empire in China.

The contents of the Rawlinson papers have now been sorted into a meaningful order and the contents listed, this note contains a brief description of its contents, in order to make clear what it does and does not contain. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–1895) is mainly remembered as a pioneer in the decipherment of cuneiform scripts but it will be seen from the documents in the collection that his interests covered a rather wider range of topics.

Since my article on the Rawlinson papers was written the Society's new archivist Nancy Charley has drawn my attention to some correspondence in the Society's archives which sheds further light on the acquisition of its Rawlinson papers. It consists of letters from Miss Elmira Wade, who in 1972 was employed as archivist both at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, the seat of the Methuen family, and at the RAS. Miss Wade had been a friend of Harry Rawlinson and his wife Meredith up to the time of the latter's death in 1951, and was named as executrix of her will.